Striving Frantically Upwards
by electrumditches
Summary: The Dream Thieves AU in which nothing much happens during summer vacation, Kavinsky is still alive at the start of the new school year, Greenmantle has better things to do than teach Latin at Aglionby, and Gansey is Blue's true love but no one cares. Combines elements/plot points of all four books. Spoilers for The Raven King. (Updates once a week.)
1. Chapter 1 - Kavinsky

Depending on where you began the story, it was about Joseph Kavinsky.

It would come as a surprise to most people that Kavinsky loved Henrietta. It was a demanding, utilitarian kind of love, but a real one. Possibly the realest thing in his life, even if it wasn't a solid entity that he could cup his hands around and hold — or crush.

Then again, Kavinsky had long ago discarded the misconception that solid went hand in hand with real. The handful of black pills in a red container in his left pocket were solid. The Mitsubishi, humming beneath his feet and around him like a pleased tom cat, was solid. Prokopenko, passed out in the back seat (he'd swallowed a few black pills too many, and Kavinsky wasn't letting him ride shotgun and risk having the fucker projectile vomit all over the windshield) was solid. His mother, back at home and knocked out by a different set of narcotics, was likewise all flesh and bones and sinews and darkened, bloodshot eyes, and solid, solid, solid.

And they were dreams: the pills, the car, Proko. All of them, dreams.

Or a dream of a dream of a dream, in his mother's case. Though that, Kavinsky reasoned, was hardly his fault, was it now? He wouldn't have to remake her over and over again if she weren't set in unmaking herself every few months or so. Mrs. Kavinsky was like a sparrow that, upon finding itself trapped behind a closed window, kept bumping against the glass time after time, never learning, as any intelligent being would, that the same action that had left her bruised and overdosed and dead five times previous was bound to get her the same result every time. At least with dad, dear old dad — putting aside everything else one might say about the man, of which there was a lot, most of it fit to be expressed only with colorful language — Kavinsky had only had to go there once. Dad had been a survivor. Not enough to survive the wrath of his own offspring, but enough that his dreamed up double (which was as perfect a copy as all of Kavinsky's copies tended to be) was doing a decent job of keeping himself in no need of replacement.

The thing about real things, Kavinsky had concluded during one of his more philosophical moods — which he tended to fall into after the longer sessions of dream stealing, when he would lie on his back on a bedding of dreamed up stuff, with the fumes of dreamed up weed trailing out of his nose and mouth as if he were a boy shaped dragon — was that they were unique. No real thing was like another real thing, whereas the stuff of dreams — the stuff of his dreams — always came out perfectly, one might even say uncannily, identical. At least they did now that he had the hang of the whole thing. He'd lost count of how many misshapen Mitsubishis he'd brought back before getting it right, but that had been different. Making his creations varied wasn't the same as fucking up and ending up with something deformed. The former required carefully aimed intent. With the latter, you really only needed to blow it. Kavinsky was great at blowing things; aiming carefully, not so much.

His reputation aside, he didn't consider himself a forger. Forgery demanded a degree of creativity which he was well aware he lacked. His dreams weren't a studio where he, the mad, magical artist, slaved over masterpieces. They were an assembly line. Gobs of dream matter falling into molds, then heated up to firmness so that they could be transported into the real world. Identical pills. Identical Mitsubishis. Identical mothers and fathers.

In the past, he'd cheered himself up (not that he often required the kind of cheering up that drink and drugs and driving couldn't provide) with the thought that at least he, the dreamer, the copier, was unique. He'd believed, and been inordinately proud, of the fact that no one in the world was like Kavinsky. And that was still true, in a sense. There remained only one Kavinsky, the original, the genuine article. But now he knew there was someone else who could do what he did. It was a matter that merited some thought.

So Kavinsky thought about Ronan Lynch.

Ronan Lynch.

His phone rang. He hauled his wandering mind back to the present and brought it to his ear.

"Kavinsky."

"Cheng, here."

Kavinsky closed his eyes and leaned against the headrest. He'd picked up without checking who was calling. It had been a mistake. He wasn't dying to talk to Cheng right now. Either Cheng. The terrifying old bitch, who was Mrs. Cheng or Cheng's mom in Kavinsky's head but got dutifully referred to as Seondeok whenever they spoke (because, he wasn't ashamed to admit, she was a terrifying old bitch), or the son, the prissy gob of shitsnot he went to school with. (Though that wasn't, strictly speaking, accurate. It implied that attending school was something Kavinsky made a habit of.) They were equally unwelcome intrusions on what had been deep thoughts or thoughts that were headed towards the deep end, and a part of Kavinsky wanted to mouth off and hang up. He didn't. He parked the Mitsubishi, veering towards the side of the road so suddenly it made even Proko stir in his drug induced stupor. Kavinsky ignored him.

"Yeah. What is it?"

"My mother wants to know if you have it already." Cheng spoke with the careful, measured tones of someone who had been told to relay a message exactly and didn't feel happy to have been asked to in the first place. He'd never struck Kavinsky as being thrilled that he got to serve as an in-between for his mother's dealings. If Kavinsky had liked Cheng better (he didn't — he tended to instantly and completely loathe anyone in possession of parents who gave a crap. It wasn't jealously, precisely, but the emotion rose from a place just as ugly) he might have pitied him. If Kavinsky weren't annoyed at being forced to think about Henry fucking Cheng when he'd rather be thinking about Ronan Lynch, he might have pitied him. If Kavinsky weren't Kavinsky, he might have pitied him. But it was what it was and he was who he was. And so he said, his voice bored and verging on slurring:

"Still working on it. These things take time, I don't just think up artefacts and poof." In his head, Kavinsky laughed a jackal's laugh at his own private joke. "Tell Mrs. C— Seondeok to sit tight. I'll call her when I have it."

"Well. Can't you hurry it up? This is urgent."

If Cheng — or Cheng's mom, but it all boiled down to the same thing — weren't a customer, and a high-paying, high profile one, Kavinsky would have told him where he could stuff his urgency. But because Kavinsky liked money, and because he wasn't stoned enough to have missed the hint of something more underlining Cheng's request, he pressed the phone tighter against his ear and scrunched up his forehead. Outside the Mitsubishi the sun went down over the town, painting the silhouettes of Henrietta buildings in vaguely apocalyptic streaks of red and gold.

"Why's it so urgent?"

Silence. Kavinsky counted the seconds. For a while it seemed like Cheng had hung up, but no — he could still hear breathing on the other end of the line, though it was faint, held back, hushed.

Finally, Cheng said:

"Did you happen to check your school e-mail account since last night?"

Kavinsky hadn't been aware that he had a school e-mail account.

"No. What's up?"

"They got us a new Latin teacher."

Kavinsky failed to see why that would be reason for concern. He could count the times he'd gone to Latin class using just his thumbs.

"So?"

"So, it's Greenmantle."

"Greenmantle," Kavinsky echoed. At last now he had an inkling of what the bee in Cheng's — both Chengs — bonnet was. "That Greenmantle?"

"That Greenmantle. Yes."

"Right," Kavinsky said, and that was all. He had thoughts. He just wouldn't share.

"Which means," Cheng went on, returning to his usual, repeat-after-mom drone, "that if he is here, in Henrietta, and is planning to stay long enough that he took on a job, then he has to be on the hunt for something. We think it's the Greywaren. We think he knows, or at least suspects, where to find it. You'll have to get your hands on it before he does."

"Right," Kavinsky said again, his thoughts still well kept secrets. He took to the road again, driving one-handed onto the interstate to make it back to Henrietta. Since Cheng couldn't see his face through the phone, he didn't hold back the smile that threatened to spill from his mouth, though he did keep down the hysterical laughter that badly wanted to follow suit. "Right. I'll get right to it."

Kavinsky hung up, having exhausted his tolerance to Cheng's voice and having spotted something in the distance that made his smile stretch further. Something old. Something orange. Something familiar.

The day just kept getting better and better.

The thing about the Chengs was that they were convinced they had a clue of what was going on. For instance, they thought that there was such a thing as a Greywaren — an object, real and solid, that birthed dreams into the world and could be bought and used and possessed. They also thought that there was only the one. And then they were under the impression — and here was where they were not only wrong, but jaw-droppingly wrong — that he'd hand it over.

Kavinsky shook his head to himself, adjusted his sunglasses and pressed his foot down on the gas pedal. He could picture, as if he were seeing it from the outside, the Mitsubishi becoming a white, bright spear, soaring over the asphalt, tires burning, making way towards its target — the Camaro. He slowed down as he got near to check out who was inside: the usual suspects, plus a girl with spiked black hair. Her face stirred recognition, but it took him a moment to place her —Parrish's new squeeze. (Though 'new' wasn't the right word, come to think of it. It implied the existence of old squeezes, which didn't seem like Parrish's style, unless he'd been taking his role as every teacher's pet in unexpectedly interesting directions.) And there was Lynch. Not one of them had looked back and noticed him, but they were about to. He'd see to it.

Kavinsky spun the Mitsubishi in a half circle and changed to another lane, easily catching up with the old heap of a car — he actually had to slow down and fall back so that he wouldn't pass them by too fast — and brought up a hand to flip off the occupants. They went to pains to ignore him, Dick the Third especially. Kavinsky rolled down the window to let him know what he thought of his rich boy ass. Dick the Third didn't seem to appreciate it, but he kept looking straight ahead, eyes trained on the road, every inch the untouchable golden princeling.

Kavinsky was fine with that. Dick the Third wasn't who the insult was meant to bait, and the true target reacted as intended. Lynch tilted his head, showing just enough face and just enough fire in his eyes to let him know that the challenge had been understood and accepted.

Unfortunately, Dick the Third wasn't having it.

The Camaro fell back, and after a second during which Kavinsky's heart believed that it might still give chase in direct opposition to what his brain told him, his impatience got the best of him. He lowered his foot to the gas pedal again, shooting forward until the others were a speck of orange in the rearview mirror. It was for the best that they hadn't taken him up on it, really. He shouldn't be daring Lynch to race him. He wanted to — and as far as Kavinsky was concerned, the things he should do and the things he wanted to do had always been one and the same — but if Cheng wasn't lying about the Greenmantle situation, then he had other, bigger things to worry about first.

Saying that Kavinsky wasn't one of nature's worriers would be understating the obvious. Fear and anxiety were emotions that happened to other people, people whose dreams were just dreams. He wasn't afraid of Cheng's mom — well, he was, but only in the abstract — or Greenmantle, or anyone who might come sniffing around looking for the not so mythical Greywaren. Even if they found out about him, they couldn't touch him — only annoy him. He knew their type. But there was someone else who could do what he did, someone who didn't know quite as much. Another dreamer. Another thief.

Once again, Kavinsky thought about Ronan Lynch.

On one hand, he'd never known anyone like himself. It might be worth it — instructive even, all of Kavinsky's misgivings about anything that smelled of education aside — to engage, check what Lynch knew, see what he could get out of a possible partnership. On the other hand, everyone searching for the Greywaren was, unknowingly, looking for someone with his power, which was also Lynch's power. And although Kavinsky was not, it needed to be stressed, afraid of them in any capacity, he wasn't wild about having them pursue him either. If throwing Lynch at them might stop them breathing down his neck . . .

He turned the car radio on and let the music blast his ears deaf. He'd have to think it all through. There was still time for it. There was no crisis, and they weren't racing.

Yet.


	2. Chapter 2 - Blue

Glendower is underground. So am I.

Blue turned the note around in her hands, careful to hold it only at the edges so that her fingertips wouldn't rub off the ink. The paper was drier than when she'd found it, on the floor of what had formerly been Neeve's old room. She had folded and unfolded it so often that it had become stiff and brittle to the touch, although it might only feel that way because she was projecting all over it.

She thought that one through. Did she, Blue Sargent, feel stiff and brittle? Check option: yes/no.

No.

Yes.

No. Not at all.

Mayhaps?

Blue tucked Maura's note back in her pocket. It was a good question. A great question too, dimension-wise, but she couldn't afford to spend a lot of time mulling it over. Others, likewise good and great and just as difficult to answer, took precedence.

Question number one was a simple but particularly tough one: where was her mother?

It had been two weeks since the note. Two weeks since Blue had returned from one of her outings with the Aglionby boys (minus one Adam, who had spent the summer out-ghosting even Noah) and found Calla waiting by the door, lines worry etched between her eyebrows, plum lips pursed tightly. Blue had been told that she shouldn't fret, and although she wasn't convinced that being told not to fret meant that there was nothing worth fretting about, she had done her best to oblige. She didn't fret. She'd just wondered more than was healthy and obsessively reread the paper containing what, the overdeveloped morbid quadrant of her brain suggested, could very well be her mother's last words.

Still, Maura had never been a conventional sort of parent, and looking back, it was obvious that this, or something like this, had been a long time coming. Maura had called on Neeve to look for Butter—Artemus, Blue's disappeared father. Then Neeve had disappeared. And now Maura had disappeared to look for him herself, or so the other denizens of 300 Fox Way thought. Blue's thoughts were that she clearly had a problem with disappearing relatives.

An issue which, to her annoyance, seemed to extend to boyfriends. She could count the times she'd seen Adam in the past months using — yes, well, both hands, but considering that she'd met the others every day or close, two hands was still criminally low.

Blue wouldn't dare pretend that the summer had been a perfect one, what with its endemic lack of Adam, Maura vanishing, the shadow of Gansey's death, the fact that just before it's start she had seen a teacher get trampled to death (although he hadn't been her teacher, which didn't make his death more right, but did mean that it hadn't hit home so hard) and the fact that she had recently had a friend buried, unburied and reburied (although just that morning she'd seen Ronan use Noah as a throwing hammer, which lessened the — no pun intended — blow somewhat.) Summer hadn't brought them any closer to finding Glendower either. But it had been two months of driving the Camaro up the ley line and back again, hiking when they couldn't drive, flying whenever they couldn't hike and Gansey's sister Helen allowed them use of her helicopter. It hadn't been perfect, but it had been good.

Blue was aware that up until recently she'd been in denial. She hadn't entirely believed that the summer wouldn't stretch on forever, magical and eventful and filled with treks and long lost kings. But the time had come. The end was nigh. Come Monday the boys would return to Aglionby, and she'd be back at the halls of Mountain View High School. She didn't know how she was going to cope. She didn't know if it was even possible to cope. High school beckoned her, and it wouldn't rest until it sank its cheerless claws in her soul.

But before it did, Blue would find an answer to pressing question number two: what was up with the hermit known as Adam Parrish?

Gansey (whom Blue remained steadfastly, adamantly not in love with) had told her what was up with Adam. Adam was working three jobs in order to pay his rent and Aglionby tuition fee. Adam had a court hearing scheduled for September (which he had told no one about, but Gansey — or, more likely given the subject matter, Ronan — had his ways of finding out about these things) and was spending his remaining free time preparing for it. Blue conceded that those were acceptable excuses to make oneself scarce, but couldn't help but think that they should have been provided by Adam himself. Furthermore, the fact that Gansey had been the one to tell her made her suspect there was more to it. Gansey wouldn't have flippantly revealed Adam's reasons if he thought they came close to conveying the whole story.

Gansey also hadn't said a word about the fight he and Adam had gotten into, not long after the latter had moved out of Monmouth. Blue had only learned of it taking place because Noah had let it slip. She didn't know what the fight had been about. It was another question to add to the pile of minor ones spawned by the question major (What is up with Adam?). She hoped to see at least half of them answered by coming to the St. Agnes rectory, above which Adam dwelled.

Provided that he was still alive. Doubts were starting to be had on that front.

Blue had never visited Adam at his room before. She hadn't been invited over and had balked at the notion of inviting herself. As far as she knew none of the others had been there save for Ronan, who had procured the room and helped organize the move — a gesture Blue wouldn't have expected from the wound-up assemblage of anger and adrenaline she'd pegged Ronan as when they'd first met, but which felt very much in character for the Ronan she'd come to know. (Though recent revelations — the dreaming thing being the least of them — had shed some doubt on the extent to which she or anyone else, Gansey included, actually knew Ronan.)

Now, standing at the bottom of the rickety stairs that led to Adam's room and reviewing what she knew of Adam himself, Blue felt she had something of an inkling of why no invitations had been issued. The St. Agnes rectory was a bog standard mirror of St. Agnes itself. It had all the austerity of a church, but lacked the solemn gravitas that might have changed it from a deeply unfriendly place into an impressive one.

Adam's door was easily spotted, since there was only the one.

Blue knocked. A minute passed. She knocked again.

Maybe Adam wasn't home.

Maybe he was ignoring her.

There was a puddle forming under her feet.

Blue looked down and stepped out of the water, frowning. It was, not entirely unexpectedly, flooding out of Adam's room.

"Adam!" She shouted one time, two times, three times and pounded on the door without bothering with the knocker. When it still failed to open she retreated a couple of steps so that the water — which kept spreading with no end in sight — wouldn't soak her fashionably worn sneakers. It wasn't ordinary water. She wouldn't have bothered to shout out if she thought Adam had let the bathtub overflow. Ordinary water would reflect the gnarly wood of the ceiling rather than oak trees, beeches, and here and there a patch of twilight sky. There were also leaves bobbing in it, green and fresh, appearing where there hadn't been any before. Blue thought about picking one up. Then she thought better of it.

She called for Adam again and fought with the lock. She didn't expect it to do any good, because it would be wholly un-Adam-like to leave his door unlocked, but it was, and she stumbled inside as it swung inwards with a sound like massive wings flapping. Blue shielded her eyes with her arm and gave a little yelp as an avalanche of water washed over her, past her, streaming down the stairs as if it were in a hurry to escape. It wasn't as cold as ordinary spring water, but it felt heavier. It definitely felt heavier as it caught her in the chest, the raw force of the stream knocking her on her back. Blue fought to breathe. When water began to spear up her nose, she fought not to.

Suddenly the weight of the stream vanished from her chest and face. Blue could still hear water, but what she heard was the mundane hissing and groaning of ancient pipes working to carry it and the drip drip splash of an equally geriatric shower head struggling to spit it out. She got back on her feet, wrung out her hair, shook herself from soaked to moist and looked around, taking in the sparse furnishings, the threadbare rug, the sun-bleached wood of the windowsill.

The only thing wet in the room was Blue herself.

She meandered over to the bathroom. The door wasn't closed in full, but the thin slice of space between it and the doorway wasn't wide enough to let her sneak a look inside. If she hadn't just come away from almost drowning Blue might have done a bit of preemptive blushing before she pushed the door open, but right now it felt like a waste. She was capital-C-plus-italics concerned. Being Concerned wasn't a state that allowed for worries like chancing to see Adam in the nude.

It turned out she didn't even have to worry, not about that at least. She found Adam sitting under the shower, knees drawn under his chin, wearing the incongruous combination of pajama bottoms and his raven emblazoned sweater. The spray of water had flattened his dusty-brown hair against his skull, and his chest heaved, ribcage blowing out and caving back in at uneven intervals. He was staring at something in the distance, away from Blue, and didn't react to her coming in. It could be that he hadn't noticed she was there.

"Adam?" Blue said, swallowing. She felt like an intruder — acutely aware that she was looking at something that she hadn't been invited to witness, yet unable to tear her gaze away.

Adam looked up. Not immediately — first he had to return from wherever his mind had wandered to. He blinked to clear the excess water from his eyes and got up, groping blindly at the wall in search for support. He turned off the water. The shower head continued to drip for a while, and so did he, and so did Blue, but eventually the bathroom went quiet enough to qualify as silent. Blue ran a list of possible conversation starters through her head. It was up to her to find one. The way Adam kept opening and closing his mouth suggested that he had lost his capacity for speech.

"There was water coming from under your door," she said. She shook her head when Adam's eyes darted from the porcelain shower basin – not even half full or in any danger of overflowing – to the only slightly damp floor. "Not this one. The one outside."

A pained look crossed his face.

"Cabeswater," Adam said under his breath. It took Blue a moment to work out that he was offering an explanation. He sank back down, losing a battle with legs that didn't want to sustain him. Blue thought he looked worn, like he could do with a full night of sleep or twenty. Blue thought that, with his water-splattered Aglionby sweater and his damp hair clinging slickly to his cheeks, he looked too much like the young man she'd seen at the church watch to be a sight she could bear for long.

She shook her head, banishing away memories of the old church at St. Marks, of a boy in a raven sweater who'd told her his name was Gansey, of everything that her ability to see him implied. They would bounce back soon enough no matter how far she threw them, but for the moment she managed to turn them into background noise. She sat down too and took Adam's hand. She didn't know whether it was the right thing to do or the worst thing to do. His fingers felt cold to the touch, but then they did not, going from corpse-like iciness to normal human warmth in an instant. As if they hoped that she wouldn't notice the change if it happened quickly enough.

She looked at Adam, and he looked back, eyes sunken and hollow and unblinking.

Blue felt a premonition of the most common sort wash over her. He was about to try to kiss her.

She turned her face away not a second too fast. His lips brushed her hair, coming shy of touching her ear. She drew further away, against the plastic pane that surrounded the shower, and combed her fingers through her ponytail as if undoing it would undo what had just happened. The scrap of contact he'd stolen shouldn't suffice to trigger anything, but she kept up the damage control just in case, rubbing away the ghost of his lips strand by strand. Only then did she risk peeking at him. Adam, still very much still alive, was staring at his hands.

"I'm sorry," he said. He looked as if he might say more but appeared to lose his nerve, enshrouding himself in silence. The fact that he wasn't speaking was telling in itself, Blue thought. Adam hadn't wanted to kiss her. Or, he did want to kiss her, but that wasn't why he'd tried just now, or not the main reason. He'd wanted a distraction — something that would give them an excuse not to talk, that would keep her from asking tough questions and save him from having to answer them.

Blue wasn't having it.

"What happened to you?"

"Cabeswater." This time the word was neither an explanation nor a reply. It sounded rather like a plea — for mercy or absolution or both. Adam tilted his head so that the side of his face rested against the tiles, his breathing nowhere near as deep as when she'd found him but still uneven.

Blue waited, her own breaths shallow, her eyes glued on his face as he grit his teeth and dug his nails in his palms. Something was about to happen. She couldn't predict what was about to happen with the sureness of a psychic's eye, but by now she had come across enough magic that she could identify the signs that heralded its coming reasonably well. The air felt charged. Clear with chance of abracadabra. Strike a match and it would ignite.

A solitary drop fell from overhead and smacked against her forehead. Blue raised a hand to wipe it away and discovered that whatever it was, it was stickier than water. Blood was her first thought, because of course it was — because at this point, it was almost impossible to expect anything else — but when she brought her hand down to wash it she saw the substance wasn't red, but a light orange-gold. Another drop went splat, this time outside the shower, and another three fell in a perfect line right after. The bathroom had previously smelled like decades old mold and cheap peppermint-scented air freshener. Now it actually smelled like fresh air — fresh air, and the warmth and richness of earth and rotting leaves and tree sap. The latter was what was on her hand and on the floor, Blue realized, and as she did, something inside her unwound. As far as random magical phenomena went, this seemed fairly benign. Every time she breathed in it was like having nature envelop her in a big, hearty hug.

She turned to Adam. He didn't look like he was being hugged.

"Are you doing this?" she asked, although she already knew the answer. Everything about him spoke of strain and effort, but it was the effort of someone trying to stop the flooding of a broken dam with his bare hands. Adam wasn't making anything happen. Quite the opposite.

Blue could see it all clearly now. This was how he had spent the better part of the summer: locked in his room, fighting to keep the forest out. And all the while she'd convinced herself that he'd chosen radio silence because of her refusal to kiss him and been too proud to check on him, and Adam had been left to fend off wild magic alone, because of course he wouldn't ask for help and . . .

She was probably a terrible girlfriend.

She was probably a terrible friend, full stop.

"Yesterday it was vines," Adam muttered, and Blue had the unsettling feeling that he was talking neither to her nor himself. His voice sounded a lot more distant than it ought to, and older, and weary, and defeated. "Last Wednesday, fish. Trouts jumping all over my bed."

"Great," she said, weakly. "I hope you caught some. It'd be a shame to waste free trout."

Adam's smile didn't go all the way up, rendering his eyes and mouth a mismatched affair, but it was the best anyone would have gotten out of him. Blue dreaded to imagine what his reaction would have been if it had been Gansey making the same joke — thought Gansey probably wouldn't have thought to in the first place.

"I don't know what to do anymore," he stated flatly. "I don't know how to make it stop."

Blue said nothing back, aware of how much it had cost him to get the admission out, aware that this was a moment that words would only spoil. She rested her hand on his shoulder. He didn't try to kiss her this time, which was a good thing, because then she would have had to smack him, and smacking Adam would be counterproductive to helping him. She inched closer until their shoulders touched, her approach slow and cautious, as if he were an unfamiliar wounded animal — one she didn't know the temper of and would be just as likely to accept her help as to react with biting and snarling.

She rethought the metaphor midway through. It was Adam. She did know his temper. He would bite and snarl. Adam was hardwired to see offers of aid as another's endeavor to make themselves tall while bringing him low, and hands extended in friendship as offensive attempts at charity. That was why he hadn't reached out, to her or anyone else. He'd sooner sit in the shower all summer long while Cabeswater wreaked havoc with his mind and dumped fish on his bed than do something as eminently sensible — but shameful and weak and pitiful, that was how he'd translate it to himself — like asking to be helped. Blue couldn't bring herself to be angry, though, or even frustrated. It was silly that he hadn't asked. However, he shouldn't have needed to ask in the first place. What else were friends for?

His Cabeswater problem wasn't one Blue was qualified to fix, but she knew exactly where to find those who were.

She grabbed a fistful of Adam's sweater and pulled him up, steadying her voice as she attempted to steady them both:

"I think you've been in here long enough. Let's dry up and go for a walk."

She led him out by the hand, ensuring he kept his eyes on her and didn't look behind him. The wall opposite to the shower had started to leak gobs of golden sap. Still not blood — but the difference was so thin as to be inconsequential.


End file.
